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According to industry analysts, digital marketing is growing at 20 percent per year and is at the top of every marketer's agenda. We help our clients connect digital strategy to business strategy with a unique set of capabilities and award-winning optimization tools.
Why get a custom website when there are free template designs available? The drawback of free templates is that having a website is not enough to generate leads for most businesses. Custom website designers know what designs and content create an internet presence that translates into your financial success. Here are five reasons why you should invest in custom website design:
- Your custom website is designed to carry your personality and brand. Your homepage especially and the overall page style carries a message - your Internet "curb appeal" in a sense. A professional and well-crafted homepage design leaves your website visitor with a positive impression on your professional abilities - which translates into someone who will fill out the online contact form, email or call you to do business.
- Your custom website design incorporates your blog into your site, maximizing both the blog's search engine optimizing ability as well as its ability to boost your credibility as an expert. Having your own blog on a free blog site does not necessarily draw website visitors to your personal website's guest book pages. Giving information without an opportunity for capturing contact data is a long term, low return investment.
- Custom website designs use keywords researched and optimized for your specific market specialization. High search engine ranking is a result of initial search engine optimization and continual monitoring of content and keywords to see what combination advances you the best.
- Custom website design companies relieve you of webmaster headaches that can be caused by hosting issues, monitoring the secure firewall to protect against hackers, and engineering the website to protect you from an influx of spam email.
- Custom website designs incorporate additional, content pages to increase brand exposure. Every custom design is built to suit your business challenges and has the goal to transform passive website visitors into active customers.
Custom website structure has the benefit of a template's coding infrastructure upon which unique graphics and content can be added. In the more competitive markets, ongoing success depends to a large extent on a business providing content that sells the sizzle. Though it creates some homework (or an opportunity to invest in professional copywriting), adding good content to a website is the best proven way to attract visitors by giving the search engines content to index.
In our experience, another difference between a free or inexpensive template versus a custom design is the free solution provides a quick website creation with long term regret due to paltry returns versus a custom solution that has a longer creation cycle followed by a long term growing return on investment.
How can a custom website cost less than a website created with a free to $500 template? Two areas to examine: overall website costs and income derived from real estate website marketing. The overall website costs include the initial design investment plus the ongoing maintenance and the pay-per-click advertising expense.
Templates keep the initial investment in the website design low, but generally create a "business card" site. This is a website that, without any pay-per-click advertising, draws its traffic from people seeing the address on a business card, printed advertisement or a verbal invitation. Often templates are database sites, that is, their content is dynamically created when visitors come to the site. These websites are faster to create, but they are usually not search engine friendly - their content is largely unseen by the search engine's indexing spiders.
Custom website designs usually start in the $1750 range and increase depending on the functionality required. That investment covers a larger amount of market-specific content, valuable search engine optimization, and better graphics with greater market appeal. The graphics are an asset to retain your website visitors. More critical is the content and search engine optimization. These lead to "organic" ranking on search engines. Organic ranking means your website shows up high in the search engine findings based on the keyword content of your site.
Websites that do not have keyword-rich content or are not search engine optimized have to rely on pay per click advertising to gain visibility on the first page of a search engine's results. Pay per click advertising can have a place in an Internet marketing campaign, especially in high profile markets. Often pay per click keyword marketing campaigns can start at $500 a month and escalate to $4000 to $7000 a month. How can it cost that much? The cost is a multiple of the number of searchers who click on the advertisement. Pay per click advertising costs are a benchmark for the value of ranking on the first page of Google or Yahoo.
Custom website designs call for a larger upfront investment, but over the long run, a custom website organically ranking on Google will hold your Internet marketing advertising budget costs down. Time is always on the side of the custom website. With unique "static" content (that is visible to search engines) and a pattern of growing website traffic, usually within 6 to 12 months of launch the website starts climbing on the search engine ranking.
In short, the custom website is a less expensive long term cost, easier for ongoing maintenance and updates, and its age only increases its search engine visibility and the result and warm leads and return on your investment.
To learn more about custom websites, driving traffic to your site through pay per click advertising, or Online consulting, contact founder/consultant Sunny Kancherla, MBA at (973) 954-2787.
Small Business Success Award Winner
Honoree of NJ Biz Magazine Entrepreneur 101
Small Business Development Center Consultant
